For fans of Miyazaki, Sherlock Holmes, and the brass era vehicles... The Sherlock Hound cartoons of the mid 1980s, a lot of Miyazaki's that I've just learned of, having thought I'd seen all the works of the master. Tremendous thrill to discover previously unknown animation!

before he co-founded Studio Ghibli, and went on to making award-winning films, Miyazaki worked on various kinds of animation for different media and pitched at different levels of seriousness. One of the most notable projects of that chapter of his career transposed the adventures of Sherlock Holmes into a world of anthropomorphic dogs.

The Italian-Japanese co-production Sherlock Hound aired as a television series between 1984 and 1985. Of its 26 episodes, which sent the corgi Sherlock Hound and terrier Doctor Watson after a variety of thieves and on all sorts of adventures across a steampunk London, Miyazaki directed six.

In the Miyazaki-directed episode “Treasure Under the Sea” for instance, the detecting duo go after a submarine purloined by recurring antagonist of both Holmes and Hound, Professor Moriarty, who here takes the form of a wolf. “The Sovereign Gold Coins” finds Hound and Watson in pursuit of that seemingly more traditional stripe of criminal known as a safecracker, and in “Mrs. Hudson is Taken Hostage,” their landlady (who seems considerably more youthful in Miyazaki’s vision than the matron in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s) goes missing, though her kidnapper badly underestimates the difficulty of pulling off his plan under Hound’s watch.

Miyazaki would direct three more episodes (“The Stormy Getaway,” “The Crown of Mazalin,” and “The Four Signatures”) before a rights dispute with Conan Doyle’s estate threw a wrench into production.

For fans of Miyazaki, Sherlock Holmes, and the brass era vehicles... The Sherlock Hound cartoons of the mid 1980s, a lot of Miyazaki's that I've just learned of, having thought I'd seen all the works of the master. Tremendous thrill to discover previously unknown animation!